Behaviorally Challenged

The “fun movie,” the one that Principal Erring had called a special treat, was just five minutes in length. It began with white letters on a sky-blue background: Peace Begins on the Playground.

Next came what appeared to be a plus sign, generating a group moan among the students. Lexa, sitting at the top of the bleachers with her friend Tashi, quietly wondered if Ms. Erring had tricked them all into watching a math movie.

But no. As the camera descended from the sky, moving closer and closer to the ground, the shape became something else. What had at first appeared to be a flat grey plus sign soon turned into tall grey walls, and what at first appeared to be dots moving around the grey walls soon became the tops of heads—which, as the camera changed its angle, turned into kids running around a playground. Not an ordinary playground, but a playground divided into four parts by the walls of the enormous plus sign.

On top of this scene appeared the word: INTRODUCING

Followed by: THE PLUS

The camera then circled around the outside of The Plus, a different scene appearing in each of its four sections as a voice described this “advancement in playground technology,” this “revolutionary idea that promises to eliminate playground conflicts so that all students may play in peace.”

In the first section, titled FRIENDLY FUN, students sat in a circle, happily chatting with one another as they wove daisies into bracelets. (Where they had gotten the daisies was a mystery, as the surface of The Plus appeared to be some kind of rubber mat.)

In the second section, titled BOISTEROUS, students were enthusiastically playing a game of—something. It was difficult to say. Not hide-and-seek because there was no place to hide. Tag? Whatever it was, it did not look very fun to Lexa.

In the third section, labeled BEHAVIORALLY CHALLENGED, students were either pushing at one another or viciously kicking at a giant rubber ball.

And in the final INDEPENDENT PLAYERS section, students walked around by themselves, like young philosophers contemplating the mysteries of the universe. Some held their hands clasped behind their backs like miniature professors.

The rest of the movie involved students talking about why they loved The Plus. They used words like fun and great and cool, but in a flat tone that suggested they had rehearsed these words ahead of time. For the finale, the camera zoomed back, revealing a rainbow that stretched from one end of The Plus to the other. Appearing in the blue sky above it, one sunny yellow letter at a time: Add peace + happiness to your playground.

“Sounds more like division than addition to me,” whispered Tashi.

When the film ended and the lights came back on in the auditorium, Ms. Erring said she had an additional surprise to announce. Pause. “Thanks to the efforts of our wonderful PTA…” Pause. “Bridger Middle School will soon have…” Pause. “Its very own…” Pause. “Plus!”

These last words were said with so much enthusiasm that everyone—even Lexa and Tashi, who had been whispering their doubts to each other throughout the film—erupted into applause. It was only after the applause died down that students began to question how being separated from their friends would be more fun—especially when, following the protests of several students, Ms. Erring went on to describe The Plus as “a necessary measure.” It had been “brought to her attention” (her favorite expression) “by a number of students” (probably Trina Erickson, who was always bringing things to Ms. Erring’s attention) “that Bridger’s playground is no longer a calm and peaceful place. There are too many students releasing too much energy, which has resulted in entirely too much noise and running around.”

And then, remembering that this was supposed to be a cheerful event, she raised her voice up again and, with a chirping tone and patter of claps said, “And as a very special celebratory treat, you may each, as you leave the gymnasium, help yourself to one cereal bar.”

Some of the questions that came up in Lexa’s English class that day:

What if you’re a Boisterous-Independent Player? (Answer: Many of our Independent Players are boisterous.)

What does boisterous mean again? (Answer: Loud, but in a good way, as opposed to our Behaviorally Challenged students.)

And this question from Lexa: What if you’re Boisterous but you have a Friendly Fun friend? (Answer: You will have plenty of time to visit with each other during lunch.)

This was not the answer that Lexa and Tashi had hoped to hear. The two had been friends since before they could even remember being friends. Their parents liked to tell stories of them stealing each other’s teething toys and how, even when they were little, Lexa was the bossy one, leading their crawls around the house. So Lexa was nearly sure that she would be assigned to Boisterous and Tashi to Friendly Fun.

Lexa’s next question: If Boisterous and Friendly Fun are both fun sections, why can’t they all be together? (Answer: Lexa, all of our sections are fun.)

Lexa: But that’s not fair! (Answer: Lexa, would you like to join our Behaviorally Challenged section?)

The Plus arrived the next week, carried to Bridger Middle School on the back of a flatbed truck, flapping WIDE LOAD signs taped to its ends. Lexa and Tashi, who had social studies class that morning and therefore had the best view of the playground, couldn’t imagine how, as wide as it was, it had even made it down Bardstown Road without knocking down every mailbox along the way.

Following The Plus into the parking lot were two forklifts, another kind of truck neither of them knew the name of, a dump truck, and a crane. All lined up they reminded Lexa a little of a parade. “They should throw candy,” she said to Tashi, but Tashi didn’t get it and Lexa was too tired, or maybe too sad, to explain.

Every time they managed another glance out the window—between Ms. Grady turning her eyes toward the projector and turning them back to the class, each time reminding students in a more and more exasperated tone that if they couldn’t keep their eyes inside, they would be recommended for the Behaviorally Challenged section—it seemed that something else had disappeared from their playground. First the swing set, then the slide and climbing wall. Hardest to see go was the tire swing, where Lexa and Tashi had passed so many recesses sitting knee to knee, spinning themselves dizzy. Lexa could feel the thud in her heart as the tire fell to the ground and was rolled away across the bark chips.

After the last scraps of the playground had been hauled away, a tongue-colored rubber mat was unrolled over the entire surface. Tashi said she thought that, except for it being square, it looked like a giant stick of gum.

When it was time for The Plus, Ms. Grady gave up trying to keep the students’ attention on the American Revolution. With a defeated sigh, she said, “Go on, then,” and the entire class rushed from their seats to claim spots at the windows. With their thirty noses fogging up the glass, the students watched as the massive thing was lifted by crane and carried to the center of the mat, where the crane operator slowly lowered it to the ground.

Ms. Grady clapped when it landed, and the more obedient among the students joined in. These students would most likely all be together in the Friendly Fun section.

Toward the end of third period, just before being released for lunch, students were given their assignments. “And do not think,” warned Lexa’s PE teacher, Ms. Talons, “that you can just trot off to join your friends, because we have given each of our playground monitors a list of your names and sections.”

As Lexa and Tashi had figured, had feared, their assignments were Boisterous and Friendly Fun, handed to them on little cards that said B and FF, and as they emptied their lunch trays and entered the playground, hugging each other before going their separate ways, each secretly dreaded that this might be the beginning of the end of their friendship. They would have no choice but to make new friends, and it would only be a matter of time before those new friends became close friends. Maybe even best friends.

The playground, on that first day, was chaos. Many students, including Lexa and Tashi, did attempt to trot off, and the trotting was made more complicated by the fact that most everyone had friends in all three of the other sections, so it took most of recess just to get students sorted and settled.

The new playground equipment would not arrive for two more weeks, and so, as a temporary measure, each of Bridger’s four sections was equipped with a large rubber ball, approximately the size of a first grader if first graders were round. There were no instructions as to what they were to do with these large rubber balls, and as Lexa stood staring at the thing, she was reminded of the experiment they had recently conducted in science class. The experiment involved ants and a block of sugar, but it was basically the same thing. Imagining herself an ant, observed from above by a giant scientist, she had a strong and growing urge to throw the experiment off somehow. Every idea she came up with, though, only seemed like exciting new ant data for the giant scientist to write down on her oversized notepad.

The other Bs did not seem to share her feelings. All were laughing boisterously as they pushed and kicked at the giant rubber ball. Was there a point to the game? Lexa could not tell, but she suspected that no, there was not a point. She could see mouths moving but could not hear what they were saying over the shouting coming from what she guessed was the Behaviorally Challenged section—or maybe it was Friendly Fun shouting from Tashi’s section, it was hard to say.

The laughter around her, mixed with the waves of sound coming from the other sections, created a kind of whirlpool inside Lexa’s head, and she found herself backing away from the ball, farther and farther, until she was tucked into the corner of The Plus.

Sitting there, fists pressed into her ears, she wished she could magically push herself through the wall into the Friendly Fun section, where she was sure she would find Tashi having a great time with her new best friends.

Of course, the truth was, if Lexa did have such magical ability, she would have found herself sitting back-to-back with Tashi, who had also tucked herself into the corner of The Plus. She too was struggling to find the point of her group’s “friendly fun” game of what seemed to be nothing more than duck-duck-goose. What exactly a giant rubber ball had to do with duck-duck-goose, she had no idea. Really, thought Tashi (who had also been reminded of the ant experiment), there could be a giant sugar cube in the middle and it would not change this game one bit.

After school, comparing notes on their walk home, kicking at the stones and pinecones in their path with a little more force than usual, Lexa and Tashi agreed that there could not possibly be a more miserable situation than having to spend their entire recess apart.

Oh, but in fact there could be a more miserable situation, as they discovered the next day during second period. That is when Ms. Erring announced over the school’s intercom system that a new decision had been made. Due to students’ “utterly unacceptable behavior” the day before, there would be no more mixing with other sections during lunch. “From now on, in order to create a more peaceful transition between lunch and recess, you will sit in the lunchroom according to your assigned groups, and be dismissed for recess one table at a time. Just look for the poster with your group’s name and—”

Here Ms. Erring paused. To say “sit there” would have been to state the obvious, and so instead she said, in a dull voice that did not at all match her words, “have fun.”

As soon as the intercom crackled off, Lexa’s class erupted in protest. Mr. Hollands, who seemed prepared for this reaction, immediately rang his “calming bell.” When the bell did not have its usual effect, he was forced to shout over the rising volume of complaints: “People! There is plenty of space available in the BC section for anyone who wishes to continue disrupting my class!”

Arriving for lunch that day, students were greeted by Ms. Erring, two additional lunch monitors, and four long tables, each with a piece of yellow construction paper hanging off its end. In the school’s usual attempt to make awful rules appear fun, BC, B, FF, and IP were written in brightly colored balloon letters. Some letters were striped in the center, others polka-dotted. All had an exclamation point at the end with a smiley face inside the dot.

The Independent Players said nothing, dutifully shuffling over to their new table. The rest of the students attempted to stay with their friends, but this only lasted as long as it took Ms. Erring and the lunch monitors to make the rounds with their clipboards, tapping kids on their shoulders and pointing them, with outstretched arms, in the direction of where they were to move themselves “pronto” or “be sent to the BC table.” This threat mattered little, of course, to students who were already assigned to the BC table, and so they received their very own customized threat of being sent to the office. By the end of lunch, the BC section had grown by five students, and three BCers stood next to Ms. Erring, awaiting their group march down the hall.

The rest of the week and into the following was much the same, though Lexa noticed that her group seemed to grow less and less boisterous with every lunch and recess. Boisterous had turned to bossy, which turned to irritated, which, by the following Tuesday, had resulted in three Bs being relocated to BC, and two well-behaved BCs and one boisterous IP taking their place. It had also resulted in more and more formerly boisterous students sitting alongside Lexa until, from her middle place in the corner of The Plus, with students lined up on both sides of her, it almost looked as if she had grown wings. If only.

With every passing day, students grew quieter and quieter until an eerie silence had descended upon The Plus. Most students just passed their recess time sitting on the tongue, as the rubber mat had come to be called. Some talked with each other in whispers. Others just silently poked their fingers into the soft rubber. Lexa, remembering the words from the movie, Peace Begins on the Playground, wondered: Was this peace? It felt more like boredom than peace. More like sadness. Like the feeling of lying awake in your bunk at summer camp, missing home.

It wasn’t that Lexa disliked the others in her section. Not at all. Before The Plus, a few of them had even been to her house. It was just that the whole thing reminded her too much of when she was little and her mom used to arrange her playdates—which always felt more like playdates for her mom, talking with her friends in the kitchen, having a good ol’ time while kids Lexa barely knew flung her toys around or, in one awful instance, bit her arm. It felt just like that now. Like here they all were, forced into a playdate, while Ms. Erring and the teachers were off enjoying their peaceful lunchtime together. It wasn’t fair.

And weren’t they the very same teachers who had taught them about freedom? About civil rights? About women’s rights? LGBTQ+ rights? About workers’ rights and animal rights?

What about recess rights? What about our rights?

Lexa had not realized she had said the words out loud—not until they came echoing back to her. First from directly behind her, “Yeah! What about our rights?” Then another voice from the other side of the wall, “What about our rights!”

The third voice Lexa heard, this one from the Friendly Fun section, was the loudest of all—not in volume, but in courage—because Lexa understood what it had taken for her friend, her quiet friend, to make her voice heard. Later Lexa would say that it was hearing Tashi’s voice that helped her to find her own courage, to step off the mat altogether.

“And where exactly do you think you’re going?” the monitor demanded as Lexa marched for the end of the tongue, urged on by the rising volume of protesting students.

The monitor, hugging her clipboard to her chest, her eyebrows pulled up into two umbrellas arching over her puddle-colored eye shadow, could barely make her voice heard above the thunder. “I believe I asked you a question!”

Lexa looked back at The Plus, where her butterfly wings—those Bs who had sat alongside her in the corner of The Plus—were no longer sitting but had risen up to stand by her side. Students from the neighboring FF section, including Tashi—led by Tashi!—had moved in to join them, and the monitor, seeing this, turned her attention from Lexa to the growing crowd. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! Everybody back to your sections or…or…”

But there was no plan for such an event, was there? This became increasingly more obvious to Lexa as she took that first step off the mat, a wave of students following behind her. “You will all be—” the monitor spat. Truly, you could see the glisten on her lips as she desperately searched for the words, any words, that might bring order back to her playground. “Every one of you will be—”

The storm—it was a storm by now—brought

teachers and Ms. Erring rushing out of the school, a few still holding on to their sandwiches and personalized mugs. “Students of Bridger Middle School!” Ms. Erring shouted into her bullhorn, Cup-O-Noodles clutched in her other hand. “You will return to your sections pronto!” And when not a single student returned to their section pronto, she added: “And if you do not wish to follow the rules of Bridger Middle School, I am sure that our BCers would be happy to have you join them.”

Those last words seemed to do the trick—though not the trick that Ms. Erring had anticipated.

Lexa, in fact, did not wish to follow the rules of Bridger Middle School. Not ridiculous rules anyway. Not rules that took away their freedom. And if that meant she belonged in the BC section, well, then that was just fine with her. “BC!” she shouted, running for the BC section, her words barely meeting the air before a dozen more rose up, the sky filling with “BC! BC!” as every student of Bridger Middle School (on Ms. Erring’s suggestion) poured into the BC section.

If you were to fly up into the sky, or say you were a giant scientist looking down on the scene, you would see below you what might appear to be an army of ants gathering their might to move something much larger than them. And in a way, that’s exactly what happened that day.

The next morning, The Plus was lifted up and carried away by the very same crew that had delivered it, its tattered WIDE LOAD signs flapping goodbye as the truck rolled out of the parking lot and onto Bardstown Road. The tongue was next, rolled up and hauled away, leaving behind it the sweet smell of bark chips, and the behaviorally challenged students of Bridger Middle School, where freedom begins on the playground.